Play trifold
Foxtrot Uniform's itch.io pageResults
Criteria | Rank | Score* | Raw Score |
Usability - How "pick up & play" is this for a Warden? | #1 | 4.176 | 4.176 |
Polish - How is the overall look/vibes/writing & design? | #3 | 4.471 | 4.471 |
Favorability - how much do you personally like the submission? | #4 | 4.000 | 4.000 |
Overall | #9 | 3.838 | 3.838 |
Theme - How well does it match the Jam's Theme? | #36 | 2.706 | 2.706 |
Ranked from 17 ratings. Score is adjusted from raw score by the median number of ratings per game in the jam.
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Comments
hiya, here are some stray notes i wrote while reading this!
"finally, an easy job" hahaha you love to see it. surely this won't go sideways! oop that didn't take long
loving these crew names. also the art is lovely, love the octopode. "aw he seems nice" i say before i read any of the accompanying text
the timeline is great, this plays out a lot like many of my fave cyberpunk-type adventures where every step forward is accompanied by 100 steps of walking-backwards-into-hell
yeah i knew that octopode wouldn't play nice. dang that's a scary guy
the competing motivations of the foxes are such a great playground for messing around. feel like there's enough here to, once you've internalized it, react to player intervention swiftly and true-to-character
great stuff!
I like the cohesive design and art.
The name is great, “FU!” I also love leveraging the look and design direction of Mothership’s spaceships for an adventure. It’s got a good balance of humour and darkness, lots of great opportunities for roleplay/violence/money making. I feel like I could have a beer with this module!
You've got a very useable, clear timetable, stakes, procedures, etc. in here. You could plug any individual element into basically any Mothership game without trouble. The link to "under the surface" isn't as strong to me, and I feel like something is missing from the artistic treatment of the octopus on the inside-right panel (maybe sized up a bit to fill the space? Or an action pose?). All in that though, great cohesive package! Well done.
Fantastic job, I really enjoyed reading through this one! Currently top of the list submissions I want to run a playtest for asap, I'll make sure to write up a play report and link it to you if I do. Below are my general thoughts for each category, I rate with half points but downgrade it for the itch-io rating system.
Polish - 4.5/5
Great minimalist design. Simple but very slick. Agreed with the prior mentioned information ordering issue, but otherwise I feel like there's a good amount of information concisely formatted into the space a trifold allows. Easy to read through and I feel like I can immediately piece together how'd I run this adventure and wouldn't have to jump around too much to do so.
Favorability - 4.5/5
I really like how this is a simple scenario and threat that becomes incredibly complicated due to outside circumstances' outside of the players' control. There's an implied ticking time-bomb of the special cargo getting loose as the players limp around on backup power before their "rescue" that can easily be played up. The Foxtrot Uniform outfit showing up would very much be a moment of relief, quickly followed by confusion and horror as the mutiny sparks the main threat's escape from containment. One of those pamphlet adventures that I feel largely runs itself once you set fuse to the initial powder keg.
Usability - 5/5
I can see myself taking this and running a one-shot of it with minimal modification. The timeline is concise and sets a clear end state for the module and the list of NPCs provides ample opportunity for the Warden to involve players in the mutiny going on. As mention by a previous commentator the only issue is just finding an implied end state that doesn't involve the destruction of the squid or the abandoning of the ship. Maybe a provision where players will get paid half for successful securing of its corpse for research purposes? Or even an alternative reward offered by either side of the mutiny for recovering the valuable warp cores? It's cool if the original corpo job conditions end up seeming impossible (I can still see a group figuring something out depending on the loadouts they start with), but having those alternate win conditions written in could help with finding a proper ending for the adventure in play.
Theme - 3/5
The octopus is an interesting connection to make for the theme, but I think outside of it being a mostly normal (albeit killer version) of an octopus doesn't make it feel as strongly related as it could be. Especially considering the adventure takes place across two space-ships otherwise unrelated to the theme. The initial pirate theming Foxtrot Uniform haves also feels a bit weak. I feel like the concept of mutinies and piracy would already be well-known to a group who base themselves off of the pirates of Earth and there's not much else that screams "they're pirates" to me outside of some of their call-signs.
The information ordering is optimized for reference during play. Scenario, timetable, cast, and monster are on one side, both ships are on the other. As a physical roll fold, you would see the page outlining the Fox crew before you see the cast list. I can certainly appreciate some confusion when approaching it as a PDF, but the ordering of information is carefully thought out for print. I'll make a mobile-friendly pdf available for a min price after the jam with the columns in a more logical linear order.
Super clean design. Maybe it'd be nice to have a version with some colour. Slight information ordering issue in that if you read the cover, then the inner flap, then everything else, it's not totally clear when you read the section on Fox Uniform that this is an entirely NPC group and not the players' crewmates.
I got it, but might need to be spelled out a little more that any warning to the FUs that they let a Bad Thing out would be an NDA violation and void any payment the players might get.
At the same time, I feel like there needs to be a way to subdue the octopode and complete the contract, as if they're going to have to kill it anyway, they might as well just violate the NDA immediately. I guess maybe the intent is the players can trap it in the exterior cargo container of the Vulpes, but they won't know about that ship's layout at the time they're first making the decision to spill the beans or not.
I think with the right group of role-players, there's the potential for some real hilarity as they try to plan with each other in front of the FUs without saying the word "octopus." But I think a high chance in many groups the NDA's broken immediately and the scenario just turns into a lot of fighting.
Anyway, very impressed overall. Main criticism is that I'm not sure how well it fits the jam theme. I guess octopuses are underwater creatures, and there's tension "under the surface" of the FU co-op, etc., but I feel like I have to stretch to convince myself it fits.
You’re definitely right that a “good ending” where the players are able to recapture the Octopode and make it to Procyon B is not well supported in the text. The NDA arrangement is primarily meant to create some immediate friction with the Fox crew (and goofs), and hopefully lead to a more intricate and volatile situation when the raid starts.
As for the theme, we decided to interpret it a bit more loosely… we’ve got a seemingly tight knit crew, but with tension bubbling beneath the surface.
A note on the information ordering, when you open the cover to read the inner flap, the page headered Fox Uniform with the Vulpes diagram will be visible. Just a quirk of roll fold ->digital conversion. I have a version for screens that I'll put up after the jam period with a min. price
I understand the ordering of the flaps, as mine is the same. That's what I'm saying though.
As you read it, you get the inner flap with the Vulpes ship and the Fox Uniform crew before you read the interior. However, that means you're reading "Fox Uniform" before getting to "The Job."
The result of that, for me at least, was that I initially assumed that the players were part of Fox Uniform and would be aboard the Vulpes, dealing with a mutiny among their own crew.
Then I got to The Job and didn't immediately notice that it was referencing a different ship, so I thought the Octopode was in that exterior cargo compartment. It was only when I got to "Now" and the sentence "Fox Uniform, a mercenary outfit, picked up your distress signal" that I realized that no, the players are on a different ship and Fox Uniform is who's coming to get them.
I realize this is partly my own fault because the cover blurb does say "Now, your ship is dead, and half the rescue crew decided today was the day that they were going to become pirates." However, I still think it would be helpful either to better establish the players' situation before introducing Fox Uniform, or include a phrase like "...who respond to the players' distress signal" in the Fox Uniform description to reinforce that they're the outside party in the scenario.
I really think that the confusion is stemming from the digital format. When you open a roll fold trifold, the first page that you see is the leftmost panel on the 'interior' spread. As long as you read left to right, you will read the Job first.
Oh, I see what you're saying. Yes, the left interior would be visible alongside the inner flap.
I'm not convinced that's the natural order in which people will read things, but yes, they're both visible at the same time. I think even though left-to-right is the normal reading order, my instinct as I'm opening something is to read the flaps first, then the interior. I designed mine so that the timeline is on the interior left panel, knowing that it would be visible alongside the inner flap, but still expecting the inner flap to be the second thing people read.
This may vary from person to person though. It's clear from Graham's post on trifolds that he's also a "flap first" guy because his numbering goes 261 345. But I'm sure you're not the only one who has the opposite instinct. https://lordgt.itch.io/children-of-eden/devlog/925521/writing-a-tri-fold-a-look-...
The other consideration is what is all on the same side of the piece of paper. Putting the timeline where you did makes perfect sense, it puts all of the information you need to understand the module on one side, and all of the information you will need to reference on the other.
I was balancing my decision making about what columns you would see first when opening the trifold, and then what makes sense to have on the spread when it's open